


that brave and and fallen few

by LiveLaughLovex



Series: to love (and to be loved) [7]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Minor Character Death, Season/Series 01 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-03 03:47:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17276507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiveLaughLovex/pseuds/LiveLaughLovex
Summary: Freddie Hart died on an average Tuesday morning in September. A wife was made a widow. A little girl was without a father. And Steve McGarrett? Well, he lost his best friend and brother the moment the fellow officer drew his final breath.





	that brave and and fallen few

**Author's Note:**

> I most definitely ended up more attached to Freddie Hart than I was ever supposed to be. Oops.

Freddie Hart died on an otherwise average Tuesday morning in September. No one other than Steve McGarrett, the best friend Hart had considered a brother, was there to witness the man’s death. He was there one moment, cheerfully chattering on about his new wife and unborn daughter, and in the next he was bleeding all over the ground, made an accidental martyr by mere circumstance. He lost his life doing what he’d done with every breath he’d breathed – protecting someone else. He told Steve to leave him behind there, on that unknown battlefield in North Korea, and took bullet after bullet as his friend made his unwanted escape.

It was the words that he last uttered softly that stuck with Steve as he stood in the untidy bathroom of the safehouse he’d somehow managed to make it to. _Tell my daughter I loved her_ , Freddie had begged him in those very last few moments of life. It was the knowledge that that was something he’d have to do, that Freddie was dead and gone and incapable of saying those words to the daughter he’d never gotten to meet himself, that made him punch the mirror with all his might, effectively shattering the glass and causing it to scatter across the tile floors. It was that realization that made the first of many traitorous tears slip, unchecked, down his cheek.

His best friend was supposed to have more time. There’d still been so much for Freddie to do. He was going to be the best man when Steve married Kono the next summer. He was their choice for godfather of the children they had yet to conceive, yet alone raise. There was so much Freddie was supposed to be around to bear witness to. It was impossible for Steve to accept, especially in that moment, that his best buddy, his _brother_ , would be missing out on all of it, simply because Steve had uttered his name in the wrong moment and, as a result, had led him directly to his death.

The phone on his hip began to vibrate, and Steve angrily removed the device from his pocket, ignoring the blood dripping all over the floor as he accepted his commander’s call and pressed the phone to his ear. _No outside communication_ , they’d said. Joe was his father’s best friend, though. Some promises he’d made in his life were much more important than those in the oath he’d taken upon enlisting in the Navy decades earlier. Keeping his godson alive was right there at the top of that list.

He had to get himself to the 38th Parallel, Joe told him. The United States couldn’t do anything until he was across the border, but the second he was, they’d take care of their own like they always did. Steve didn’t make the sarcastic quip he wanted to, about Freddie being one of their own, because it wasn’t true. Freddie hadn’t been one of theirs. He’d been one of Steve’s. And his blood was on Steve’s hands alone.

He got himself to the border, but it wasn’t for himself. It was for Kono. Moreover, it was for Freddie. His friend had died so that he could possibly survive. Steve wasn’t going to spit on his grave by giving up so close to the finish line.

Joe was there, in the Humvee, when Steve climbed in. “We’re going to get a lock on Hesse,” the commander promised him roughly.

It was his way of saying what couldn’t be said, of expressing the sympathies that, according to the United States government, were not to be expressed. Freddie’s death hadn’t happened on their watches. He’d be missing in action for the rest of time. His wife would never know the truth. And it was all because Steve had trusted him more than anything and then been the one to most let him down.

Steve nodded once. “Good,” he muttered thunderously in response. “Because the second we get him in our sights, he’s mine.”

He feared nothing as he uttered the words. Freddie had always had his back on the ground. He’d have his back from up above, too. And Steve? Well, he was going to make sure he used the second chance he’d not have had without Freddie to make sure the man who’d made a widow out of a new wife and taken a little girl’s father away before she could even draw her first breath. That was what brothers did for one another. He and Freddie had never been anything less.

**Author's Note:**

> Title Credit: "The Bivouac of the Dead," by Theodore O'Hara.


End file.
